Carefree Tips For Time-Saving Financial Apps

With an ever-changing world of technology, it’s hard to know what the latest software or app is available to help you streamline your budgeting and bookkeeping efforts in your business (or personal life). So, the team at Carefree Bookkeeping wanted help point you in the right direction!

So much of our lives are spent online these days and subscribing to services, paying bills, or banking is no exception. Gone are the days our kids are walking around with checkbooks and check registers. And, this is trend is not unique to the “next” generation, many businesses today handle a lot of their business online, so gathering those numbers and being able to forecast or control budgets can sometimes be a challenge.

Here are our top 5 financial apps to help you stay organized and on track.

(1) Basic Budgeting Apps

When it comes budgeting, Mint and Every Dollar are both good, solid, and free apps you can start using today. Pay a small monthly upgrade fee and unlock additional features.

Both apps can be hooked up to the bank account to subtract funds from the budgeted account.

(2) Tracking Mileage for Business

To keep track of the mileage on your vehicles; whether you’re an independent contractor or you have a team that needs to track mileage, parking or meter costs, Mile IQ is an easy app to use to keep track of it all and provide easy, more accurate reporting at tax time. There’s a free version if you don’t need to track more than 40 trips a month or a premium or team version available with added benefits and reporting. And, both can sync with your mobile and desktop, so you can view everything right at your fingers.

Google® maps is also starting to email you reports of miles tracked by the data giant when you have tracking and roaming turned on and you can correlate it with your Google® calendar and Google® maps. This process is a bit more cumbersome at the present time, and with so many opting out of Google® tracking; even on a case-by-case situation, the reporting of “business miles” could be less than accurate. Plus, you’re missing out on notes about parking, toll fees, or maintenance notes.

(3) Expense & Receipt Tracking Apps

Digital receipts are not unique to online purchases any more. Many brick’and’mortar stores are offering digital receipts at checkout. And, in an age where “recycling” and “responsibly green” are the trends, we tend to pare down paper clutter more quickly. So, where are you storing your online receipts? Those receipts are still needed for taxes and audits, proofs of purchase situations, and even insurance or service claims. Expensify to the rescue! This app can be synced directly to popular accounting software like Xero or your Quickbooks account, (but make sure you’re using the right version of QB – Carefree Bookkeeping can walk you through this). Having an app like Expensify at your fingertips will make it easy to find that receipt and any notes you wrote on the receipt as it pertains to a job, client, or business expense.

Wally is an integrated expense tracker app that provides insights into your spending habits using artificial intelligence and other trendy technologies. Wally has a big focus on expenses and will provide feedback and useful insight into your spending habits, but it also has a social feature a la Venmo for shared expenses.

While it doesn’t have live bank links (at least in the Wally+ version for Android, yet), that adds a little extra security for hack apprehensive Millennials. When you add in the pretty graphics and social features, you have something many Millennial users will enjoy using.

Although Wally was initially designed for personal finance tracking and is 100% free, no upgrade versions even available at this time, we find that some independent contractors will be able to use this software easily for their receipt tracking and simple budgeting guides.

Special Note – Carefree Bookkeeping is providing these as a resource for you to consider and has no stake in their use, nor guarantees performance for your specific use and purpose.

Looking for more great tips? Turn to the Financial Coaching experts at Carefree Bookkeeping for all your personal and business finance goals.